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Part 58: India

Let's steal some funds from the evacuation fleet to fund our own personal ambitions! Three cheers for corruption!

Uh Fedorov, I really don't think there's 50,000 credits worth of minerals there. That looks to be a pretty small patch.

How dumb is this guy?

We'll be conducting a lot of research this mission. Our first target is the upgraded Repairer. Just like the UCS version, this one will let us upgrade units in the field. No more wasting initial deployments because they're horribly outdated!

The UFO found some Small Towers to the north. I let it do it's "kill everything while not taking damage" thing.

With the new upgraded Repairer I can finally add shields to my Caspians. I can also upgrade the Siberia Rs that I got at the start of the mission.

Oh good! Here's our first shipment back to HQ. I hope my men at the Spaceport have their orders.

Excellent. We've transferred 2,000 credits to our HQ funds and no one is the wiser in ED command.

This is the first part of the Credit Trick. I may have mentioned it earlier but you can use this to get around missions where you can't break out and get the credits you need. Once you've removed the credits from the Spaceport, just send them back using the Ukraine and put them in the Ore Transport Base. You'll be able to count them as being sent again. It won't help with the overall construction of the ship but it can prevent a mission failure, especially if you accidentally mined a bit too much and are a few thousand short of finishing the mission.

While I'm embezzling from the fleet meant to save us all from a terrible fiery death, the UFO has found the weirdest outpost ever. A single LC Mine, and an undefended UCS VPC and Power Plant. Strange.

Oh well. They're gone now and we'll just never know why they were there. What a shame. (I personally think its there to let you know that both the UCS and LC are present in this mission)

There's a whole bunch of trees covering this larger mineral patch. I guess Fedorov isn't that much of an idiot after all, there's a lot more than 50,000 credits here.

Why are the LC sending a single Lunar R to attack the UFO? Haven't they seen what it can do?

The UCS is much more prepared for us this time around. Even the UFO would get torn to bits trying to get into this base. So I'll focus on annoying the LC this mission.

Speak of the LC, look who's shown up to welcome us to the neighborhood. And the UFO is missing its shots. I suppose that's one downside of the UFO; its shots move a bit slowly.

With the new mining base set up the mission can basically run itself on autopilot at this point. I just need to keep stealing the credits from the Spaceport. So to spice things up, why don't we go and see how the LC are doing? They sent a welcoming committee, it would be rude not to send one of our own back.

Using some of the liberated funds, I focus our next research efforts on the Kruszchev. I've been spelling it Khrushchev this whole time but I guess the game uses a different spelling. It's the heavy ED tank and it will completely replace the Pamir once it's researched.

The LC have 4 Guardian towers guarding their base. I wonder how they'll fare against the UFO?

Not so well. Although, granted they did do a good chunk of damage to the UFO.

It's nothing the Repairers can't fix though. So let's go back and see what's inside the base!

Welp. That's a whole bunch of Thunderers. It's less of a threat now that the UFO has shields but they can still do some pretty serious damage. Time to bring in the Groznys.

Er, if they didn't follow the UFO here where did they go exactly? Maybe they're just hanging back by that lake.

The first version of the Khrushchev is ready. You can mount secondary weapons with the Heavy Cannon although I chose not to here. I'm trying to keep the ED force fairly disposable and cheap, adding a second weapon mount here would only increase the cost and build time.

Work on the upgrade begins. The embezzlement is also going well, since HQ now has over 12,000 credits to put towards research.

A major UCS offensive has begun. They've started by attempting to soften up my army with their Gargoyles. They should continue to focus on harassing like they did in Madagascar. That worked a lot better than "park next to my army and get blown out of the sky."

The UCS bring in some walkers with plasma, but they forgot to equip them with shields. What a silly mistake. Lasers might be outdated against shielded enemies but I've not completely stopped using them yet.

Aw man. So that's where the Thunderers went. I must say, hitting the Aerial Supply Depot is not a bad call. If I can't reload then the Groznys are worthless. Fortunately I put shields on the initial base in case something like this happened. Plus the Groznys were all hanging out there so with their firepower combined with the base defenses it wasn't too tough to take this one down.

20,000+ credits sent and not a penny has gone up to Salut.

Okay, this is more like it. The UCS send their Gargoyles to the rear of my base to pick off anything back there while they simultaneously send Panthers to distract my army. The UFO wasn't out raiding though, so he's able to neutralize the ground threat.

Nice attempt though.

I've added an hR Khrushchev to the unit list. The upgraded chassis has an additional 150 HP and 1 more point of speed.

Again, now that I have the upgraded Repairer, I can upgrade these to the final model once the research is complete.

Now that the UCS have settled down, I send the UFO back out to do some raiding along with a Grozny escort to take out any Thunderers.

Some of them do manage to make it back to the initial base and do some minor damage. But when every structure has homing rockets it's tough to last long.

While I'm picking off the LC's Solar Batteries I notice they have a Crusher tank heading towards the UFO. Crushers and Thunderers!? Does this mean the LC have completely filled out their tech tree? Damn, I'm in a bit of a bind if that's the case.

Yes General, "we" certainly do.

Since the LC and UCS aren't threatening my position anymore I decide to stick around and get every last credit for the war effort. I'm sure more research will come up soon.

The final Khrushchev chassis is finished. Now for the two additional shield levels.

The Repairers work on upgrading the Khrushchevs I've already built. It's really nice to have that ability after timing my production to coincide with the completion of research the last 15 or so missions.

The Minelayer is the last thing on the docket for today. It lays mines. It's not very useful.

We stole over 60,000 credits for our continuing war effort. And we got another 35,000 or so that I used on research this mission. Not a bad haul. I'll just have to make sure I have my story straight when Igor asks why he didn't get his most recent shipment.

I wanted to show this third screen to point something out. The UCS spent 10,000 credits on ammo. This is very bad news for us. Why is this bad news? Because only 2 pieces of ammo in the game cost money: ED ballistic missiles and bombs used for the ED or UCS Bomb Bay. This means the UCS has bomber technology they just chose not to use it this mission. Between this development and the LC's apparent completion of their tech tree, our technological advantage is quickly slipping away.

rest of briefing posted:

This could be the ultimate weapon against our enemies, the UCS! They are attacking our base there.

You must get the Cannon Prototype to safety! Hurry!

The last ED energy weapon may help tilt the tide back in our favor. The Ion Cannon allows you to disable unshielded units in one shot. And then you can capture them and use them against their former owners. It may not be a UFO, but I think it's pretty damn good. Lets do some more thieving!

Adverts by Project Wonderful

Hey, adverts can be pretty annoying, right? I know how it is; I don't like it when I'm browsing a site and I accidentally trigger an awful flash ad where a big, freakish iPhone starts singing at me. That's why here on the Let's Play Archive we'll only ever serve up nice banners that behave properly.

The Archive is a personally-funded hobby, and without donation/advert revenue we won't be able to keep it going. Please, if you enjoy the site, consider adding us to your AdBlock whitelist—it really does make a difference.